a treatise on parents and children(父母与子女专题研究)

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A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

A TREATISE ON

PARENTS AND

CHILDREN

BY BERNARD SHAW

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of

the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force

either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms:

indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal.

Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends

the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of

outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that

new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. Do

away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in fact if you

went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people to make room

for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life

Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for

ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently

imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a

machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded in

half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose. He

also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream of

personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of despair

would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror could

provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living for a

thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that

it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to come back, as

Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of glory. We must

all be born again, and yet again and again. We should like to live a little

longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we

could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle liking is not will. It is

amazing--considering the way we talk--how little a man will do to get 50

pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have ever known of have been more

easily earned than a laborious sixpence; but the difficulty of inducing a

man to make any serious effort to obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the

difficulty of inducing him to make a serious effort to keep alive. The

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

moment he sees death approach, he gets into bed and sends for a doctor.

He knows very well at the back of his conscience that he is rather a poor

job and had better be remanufactured. He knows that his death will make

room for a birth; and he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he

aspired to be and fell short of. He knows that it is through death and

rebirth that this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put

on immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his

imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is only one

belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory; and that is

the belief that we can lay down the burden of our wretched little makeshift

individualities for ever at each lift towards the goal of evolution, which

can only be a being that cannot be improved upon. After all, what man is

capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself

would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate

that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall

no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present

imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that

you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new

person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly

enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you

wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably

damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do

people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality. And

this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating persons

who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact. Death is

for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not

outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one another idle

stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we

cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and

born better is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or

perhaps the university of Oxford.

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

The Child is Father to the Man

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat

children on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these

fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers,

forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck you as

curious that in a country where the first article of belief is that every child

is born with a godfather whom we all call "our father which art in

heaven," two very limited individual mortals should be allowed to appear

at its baptism and explain that they are its godparents, and that they will

look after its salvation until it is no longer a child. I had a godmother

who made herself responsible in this way for me. She presented me with

a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges, larger than the Bibles similarly

presented to my sisters, because my sex entitled me to a heavier article. I

must have seen that lady at least four times in the twenty years following.

She never alluded to my salvation in any way. People occasionally ask

me to act as godfather to their children with a levity which convinces me

that they have not the faintest notion that it involves anything more than

calling the helpless child George Bernard without regard to the possibility

that it may grow up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of

all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true

representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such posers

are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or, as we often

call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally have meant

something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded,

but to clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current

thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are

very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory

may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate

physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far as it

will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its condition is

that which adults recognize as the most miserable and dangerous

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of slavery. For

its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the parties, and to public

opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags. Also,

in a very large section of the population, parents finally become dependent

on their children. Thus there are checks on child slavery which do not

exist, or are less powerful, in the case of manual and industrial slavery.

Sensationally bad cases fall into two classes, which are really the same

class: namely, the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the

sensual luxury of petting children, and the children whose parents are

excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of physically torturing them.

There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has

effectually made an end of our belief that mothers are any more to be

trusted than stepmothers, or fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a

growing body of law designed to prevent parents from using their children

ruthlessly to make money for the household. Such legislation has always

been furiously resisted by the parents, even when the horrors of factory

slavery were at their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present

would be impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot

control a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of

service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general

servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and girls

do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary to coerce

poor parents to send their children to school, though in the relatively small

class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible to induce parents to

keep their children at home instead of paying schoolmasters to take them

off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children

does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves in

adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes mitigates

it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another as two

classes in which all the political power is on one side; and the results are

not at all unlike what they would be if there were no immediate

consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other black, or

one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked as gentle

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in the case and

political rights for everything. But a denial of political rights, and the

resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of another, affects their

relations so extensively and profoundly that it is impossible to ascertain

what the real natural relations of the two classes are until this political

relation is abolished.

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:

that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if

you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your

own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If

you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with,

or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you (and

these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through in spite of

you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly

be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest

aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly

any limit to the mischief you may do. Swear at a child, throw your boots

at it, send it flying from the room with a cuff or a kick; and the experience

will be as instructive to the child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog

or a bull. Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children

when he found one within his reach. The effect on the young Places

seems to have been simply to make them keep out of their father's way,

which was no doubt what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all.

Francis records the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his

stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the

outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to

his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only sort

of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose

religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father;

and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as

compared with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes

himself on his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and

parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and

what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct

on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and

eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of

abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence.

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Not that it is possible to live with children any more than with grown-up

people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There is a point at

which every person with human nerves has to say to a child "Stop that

noise." But suppose the child asks why! There are various answers in use.

The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for it may strike the

child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also the child, having

comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive your meaning vividly

enough. In any case it may want to make a noise more than to spare your

feelings. You may therefore have to explain that the effect of the irritation

will be that you will do something unpleasant if the noise continues. The

something unpleasant may be only a look of suffering to rouse the child's

affectionate sympathy (if it has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion

from the room with plenty of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the

same: there are no false pretences involved: the child learns in a

straightforward way that it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also,

perhaps, that Mamma, who made the child learn the Sermon on the Mount,

is not really a Christian.

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither

straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it

substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that the

child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural infantile

procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and the fact that

it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it in the least.

Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into "If you do that,

angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who used to tell me

that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did not behave with a

single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would come down the

chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people told me I should

go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them. Bodily violence,

provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked resentment and not

vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of pious fraud harms it.

There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and there are also human limits to

it. There is an active Society which brings to book a good many parents

who starve and torture and overwork their children, and intimidates a good

many more. When parents of this type are caught, they are treated as

criminals; and not infrequently the police have some trouble to save them

from being lynched. The people against whom children are wholly

unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and

cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it

should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go. All the ways

discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described

quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots,

struggling with one another for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt

to pervert that precious and sacred thing the child's conscience into an

instrument of our own convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible

power called Shame to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire

from the altar: a sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and

pedagogues, that one can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm

in stealing a few cinders when they are worrited.

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can

hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation of

the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes a

secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into which

every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's content. A

gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he

was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat

his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness.

On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue

at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the

lives of this gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible

for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions. And yet

he might have written his letter to The Times (he very nearly did, by the

way) without incurring any danger of being removed to an asylum, or

even losing his reputation for taking a very proper view of his parental

duties. And at least it was not a trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It

was much more respectable than the general consensus of opinion that if a

school teacher can devise a question a child cannot answer, or overhear it

calling omega omeega, he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the

cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of

reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say

"This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as

cruelty. The injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said

frankly "I beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I

can contrive an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the

child as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which

is exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body, out

of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and blinding

of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to anyone.

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ATREATISEONPARENTSANDCHILDREN1ATREATISEONPARENTSANDCHILDRENBYBERNARDSHAWATREATISEONPARENTSANDCHILDREN2TrailingCloudsofGloryChildhoodisastageintheprocessofthatcontinualremanufactureoftheLifeStuffbywhichthehumanraceisperpetuated.TheLifeForceeitherwillnotorcannotachieveimmortalityexceptinveryloworganis...

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a treatise on parents and children(父母与子女专题研究)

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